Here are a few quotations that I copied into my notebooks, in some cases as long as four years ago but in one case as recently as last week:
It is as though an orange tree refused to flower for fear of committing a sin.
—Stendhal, On Love
The traditional British struggle with macaroni brought her down sharply from tragedy to farce.
—Elizabeth Bowen, The Hotel
And even though the tall giraffes were tough,
And even though the tough giraffes were tall . . .
—dream poem of John Chamberlain, cited by Edmund Wilson
"But it was nice while it lasted," Charlie said. "We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us. . . ."
—Fitzgerald, "Babylon Revisited"
If it's important to be sublime in anything, it's surely in evil.
—Diderot, Rameau's Nephew
"Mais quoi! Toujours le roman! Hélas!"
—La duchesse de Sanseverina, La Chartreuse de Parme
We made no more provision for growing older, than we did for growing younger.
—Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
In that same spirit of improvement, which was so busy everywhere, I could discern something like a shadow, that showed it was not altogether of that pure advantage, which avarice led all so eagerly to believe.
—John Galt, Annals of the Parish
He was not a particular person, but a sample or memento—reminding one of certain "goods" for which there is a steady popular demand.
—Henry James, The Reverberator
Historical-mindedness is so much a preconception of modern thought that we can identify a particular thing only by pointing to the various things it successively was before it became that particular thing which it will presently cease to be.
—Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers
I remember when I was abroad, the trees, and grass, and wet leaves, rustling in the walks of the Thuilleries, seemed to be as much English, to be as much the same trees and grass, that I had always been used to, as the sun shining over my head was the same sun which I saw in England; the faces only were foreign to me.
—William Hazlitt, The Round Table
With bloudy mouth his mother earth did kiss,
Greeting his grave . . .
—Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
Part of our existence lies in the feelings of those near to us. This is why the existence of someone who has lived for days during which man was merely a thing in the eyes of man is non-human.
—Primo Levi, If This Is a Man
You see Englishmen, here in Italy, to a particularly good advantage. In the midst of these false and beautiful Italians they glow with the light of the great fact, that after all they love a bath-tub and they hate a lie.
—Henry James, Letters
A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
The pleasure which there is in life itself.
—Wordsworth, "Michael"
I could observe, in little pieces, as it were; but as to making a net of a number of these pieces, and catching anybody in it, that was, as yet, beyond me.
—Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen.
—George Peele
I regard the march of history very much as a man placed astride of a locomotive, without knowledge or help, would regard the progress of that vehicle. To stick on, somehow, and even to enjoy the scenery as we pass, is the sum of my aspirations.
—Henry James, Letters
It is the ongoing—i.e., the "becoming"—of the world that produces its sadness. If the world stood still at a felicitous moment there would be no sadness in it.
—Thomas Hardy, Early Life, qtd. in Aaron Matz, Satire in an Age of Realism
I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.
—Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World